how secure is your password ...

[sunny-dave]

Just woke up to find a very old (pretty much inactive) gmail account has been hacked - I don't think anyone here has received any spam - but apologies if you did. Now busy changing *all* passwords for *everything* - deep, deep joy ...

gmail/google spotted the suspicious activity (login from mexico and attempt to email all my contacts) and suspended the account. When my phone tried to check for mail on that account (as it does once a day) the login failed and the phone displayed an alert. I then had to go through the account retrieval process to regain control of the account.

Just to spur everyone to look at their own passwords .... the cracked password was of the form xxxxxxxxnn (that is eight letters, not a real word, followed by two numbers) - which isn't exactly a pushover but was obviously susceptible to brute force cracking (from bloody mexico it seems) ... new ones now include assorted punctuation characters and mixed caps/lower case - what a pain ...

[snags]

''xxxxxxxxnn''

Unbelievable. That is (was) also my password.

[funnygirl]

This happened to me a couple of weeks ago!
I reckoned I was being hacked from Italy!!!!

[RATTER15]

I really cant say mine is very secure to honest but at least I can remember it.

[sandyRoe]

Harry Redknapp and I have the same idea when it comes to passwords. The name of our pet dog and the last 2 numbers of the years of our birth.

[TWR]

Hi Dave

Thanks for the concern, there was a person on TV yesterday talking about persons & their passwords, his opinion was people change their passwords on a regular basis & use many many combinations of ! " & * ( $ 3 to make it harder to be hacked, I feel for the Mature Elderly that get confused regards their passwords & up to a point MAY NEED HELP, it really Izzes me off when some basds will destroy some one's life / account /money/ by doing this.

[Mosaic]

I'm with TWR - but I don't think it stops with 'the mature'.
Sandyroe's infallible method :) is used by swathes of teachers, for example. Many of these keep pictures of their pets either as screensavers or in the classroom. Many even talk about their pets. So guessing is simple.
I worked alongside a schools ICT consultant who used 'password' as their password all the time (when not dropping laptops.....)
The number of times it is the day of the week, or colours of the rainbow.....

[Traci66]

Probably not at all, I use the same password for everything and also have the same pin numbers on all my cards.

[venator]

In the good old days, "letmein" would get you into lots of places - oh for those lovely innocent days...

[Swanson]

Pretty much the same here, I must try harder.

[EvianBaby]

Dave, your story suggests to me it doesn't really matter how complicated your password is, they have other ways of getting in if they really want to.

[ChuckFickens]

"new ones now include assorted punctuation characters and mixed caps/lower case - what a pain ..."

Make life easier for yourself...

http://imgs.xkcd.com/...password_strength.png

(4 words is probably a bit much, 3 will do for most things)

[EvianBaby]

I bet if in half an hour I try logging in to other ABers accounts I will succeed when I enter 'correcthorsebatterystaple' as th answer ;)

[EvianBaby]

*as the password

[sunny-dave]

... and, of course, when I have my thinking head on (rather than a 'jesus wept' instant reaction) as far as defeating brute-force hacking is concerned chuck is absolutely right - the only important thing is length ...

[boxtops]

There was an article in the press last week saying that thousands of Linked-In passwords have been hacked - must change mine....

[Kiki-frog]

Boxtops - thanks for the warning. I'm on Linked-In but find it pretty pointless really, so I think I might just delete my account altogether now.

[olive_quinn]

I feel you here. Even a strong password is not enough to prevent our accounts from being hacked. I don't know what's with these hackers anyway - wasting their time cracking email passwords! I configured all my accounts using the 2 verification by google and now I worry less about being hacked. I found this article through Google about the 2 step verification http://darktips.com/h...account-from-hackers/ This might help.

[woofgang]

If its a brute force randomly generated hack then nothing will stop it and you are just unlucky. That's why its helpful when there are limited numbers of attempts allowed before locking the account.